The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Instead of using the straps that came with the module used for storing cargo, which NASA’s astronauts on the space station apparently found cumbersome, they found straps using a NASCAR design that the astronauts loved.

  SpaceX even questioned the kinds of latches that were used in the lockers of the space station. Each locker required two latches, which each cost $1,500 and had twenty to twenty-five parts. At “SpaceX, we weren’t going to build that,” recalled John Couluris, of SpaceX mission operations. “One engineer was inspired—I think it was honestly in the men’s room—where he saw the latch on a stall, and we were able to make a locking mechanism out of that.”

  Instead of $1,500, it cost $30. “It’s more reliable, and it’s easier to replace if it ever goes bad,” Couluris said. “The astronauts, not only did they love it, but they loved the story behind it because that shows the ingenuity.”

  Once Musk got wind that the air-conditioning system used to keep the satellite cool in the rocket’s fairing, or nose cone, was going to cost some $3 million or $4 million, he confronted the designer in his cubicle about it.

  “What’s the volume in the fairing?” he wanted to know. The answer was a couple thousand square feet, less than the size of a house.

  He turned to Shotwell and asked her how much a new air-conditioning system for a house cost.

  “We just changed our air-conditioning,” she replied. “It was six thousand bucks.”

  “Why is this three or four million dollars when your air-conditioning system is six thousand dollars?” he demanded again. “Go back and figure this out.”

  They did: they bought six commercial A/C units with larger pumps that could handle a larger airflow.

  It was new and innovative and totally different than anything NASA’s leadership was used to. And it took some convincing that, though different, SpaceX’s approaches were still okay.

  “The biggest challenge, I think, that we had in the execution of this was convincing NASA, every step of the way, that though we’re going to do business very differently, we’re going to get it right,” Shotwell said. “Because no one had experience doing this job the way we wanted to do this job. Unfortunately, the industry is frankly, I think, hampered—I’ve been doing this for thirty years, so I think I can say that—by cost-plus contracts. The incentive on a cost-plus contract is not to minimize cost, it’s to maximize effort. Our philosophy was not minimize effort, but optimize effort.”

  NASA officials were, at first, flabbergasted. But SpaceX ultimately won them over with its scrappy, Silicon Valley ethos.

  “When we talked to them about a given part or component in the design, they’d say, ‘Well, we could go buy this from this vendor, but it’s like $50,000. It’s way too expensive. It’s ridiculous. We could build this for $2,000 in our shop.’ Almost every decision that they made had cost built into it,” said Michael Horkachuck, a NASA official, who worked closely with SpaceX on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

  “It was unique because I almost never heard NASA engineers talking about cost of a part when they were making design trades and decisions. They were worried about is it going to work, is it going to work reliably and safely and meet all the requirements? Cost generally, although a factor, was never really in the forefront as much as mission success.

  “Here they were making more trades on, ‘Well, you could do it that way, but this way is a whole lot cheaper and probably just as good.’ That was a different mind-set, and I think something that maybe the rest of the agency needs to look at a little bit more.”

  IN 2008, NASA was building a big rocket, too. A pair, actually—the Ares I, which would fly to low Earth orbit, and the Ares V, which was destined for the moon and then Mars. Along with the Orion spacecraft, their names, taken from Greek and Roman mythology, matched the lofty aims of what was then a White House program called Constellation.

  They were part of President George W. Bush’s plan—called the Vision for Space Exploration—for the nation to return to the moon. In a speech at NASA headquarters attended by Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the lunar surface, the president recited what Cernan had said as he departed the moon, promising that “we shall return.” In his speech, Bush promised that “America will make those words come true.”

  But in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, his NASA transition team led by Lori Garver, a space agency veteran who had also advised Hillary Clinton, had promised to “look under the hood” at Constellation. And when it did, it found all sorts of problems. The costs were skyrocketing, the schedule was slipping, and there was frustration that yet another attempt by a president to re-create the Apollo magic was falling short.

  Bush’s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago, the United States had reached the moon, but its space program had since had so many false starts, been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises, that now the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to the ground.

  “He wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,” David Letterman said in one of his monologues. “You know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He’s been drinking again.”

  Cernan’s prophecy was in trouble. And his prediction that Apollo 17, the last of the lunar missions, “was the end of the beginning, and not the end,” seemed increasingly hollow. By 2008, when Obama was elected, the moon seemed as distant as ever. The Next Giant Leap was going to once again be postponed.

  THE OBAMA WHITE House hadn’t yet gotten to nominating a new NASA administrator but was already moving ahead to manage what it saw as a crisis. The troubled space shuttle program was scheduled to retire in 2010, and with Constellation running years behind schedule, that meant NASA would lose the ability to fly astronauts from US soil.

  After fifty years of historic launches—from Alan Shepard’s suborbital voyage and John Glenn’s orbit to the Apollo moon missions and the shuttle—the United States would have to rely on Russia—the country it had bested in the race to the moon—for rides to the cosmos.

  On December 8, 2008, one month after Election Day, a “private and confidential” forty-five-page memo written by President Obama’s NASA transition team identified the gap in flight from US soil as the “biggest near-term challenge for NASA.”

  “The Ares I/Orion programs are budgeted at close to $15 billion over the next five years, have significant technical challenges, and are at least two years behind schedule,” it read. The new NASA leadership would have a choice to make about the future of the program—and of NASA.

  One option was to rely even more on the commercial sector. If such companies as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences could fly cargo to the space station, then they could also be trusted to fly astronauts there. And maybe they could do it even cheaper and faster.

  “While investment in new technology is inherently risky, funding a commercial crew transport effort.… may be a viable alternative or complement to Ares I/Orion,” the memo continued, “and would support President-Elect Obama’s commitment to drive economic and technological innovation through public/private partnerships.”

  To many on the transition team, the Constellation program was a holdover not just from a previous administration, but from an old way of thinking about how to get to space—big government programs that satisfied Congress because they led to jobs. But they rarely, if ever, produced reliable and efficient transportation to space.

  As the new leadership came into NASA after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the frustration with NASA’s inability to advance further since Apollo was felt acutely. One member of the new leadership team circulated a PowerPoint slide laying out the retreat in American human spaceflight, as compared to commercial aviation:

  In 1961, [Yuri] Gagarin was first person to fly in space

  —48 year
s later (Year 2009)

  • 46 people expected to travel to low Earth obit

  • Risk of loss of life estimated at 1 in 254

  In 1903, Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk

  —48 years later (Year 1951)

  • 39 million passengers flew on commercial airlines

  • 1 fatal accident in 288,444 departures

  The “lack of progress over 50 years is partly caused by [a] closed approach innovation,” the slides stated.

  The new leadership’s solution would be an “open innovation strategy to stimulate commercial spaceflight capability.”

  Nearly a decade after Andy Beal folded his company, complaining that he couldn’t enter the closed market, here NASA was acknowledging that it needed to open up.

  One of the most significant ways to do that would be to start what it called a “commercial crew” program, a competition to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.

  By 2009, it was becoming increasingly clear there was the political will inside the White House to kill Constellation and take on the massive political fight in Washington that would ensue. Constellation’s big, legacy contractors were well established and well connected. But an internal memo at NASA took aim at Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, with a title that read “Canceling Constellation: Bringing Reality to the Vision.”

  The paper, marked “for NASA internal use only,” acknowledged that the “vision has had widespread support, but that vision is far different from the realities of the actual Constellation program.”

  The realities were that the program “is not on track to return humans to the moon by 2020, as is widely believed.” The program “eschews technology development.” The cost of the Ares I rocket had “tripled in four years,” whereas the cost of the Orion spacecraft “doubled in four years.”

  But killing the program would be tough. NASA had already awarded more than $10 billion for Constellation. And while a lobbyist from SpaceX commended NASA’s new leaders for the bold move, he warned them in an e-mail that it would be rough:

  “The only thing more difficult than killing a big Lockheed or Boeing government program is killing a Lockheed AND Boeing program,” he wrote.

  On November 16, 2009, White House budget director Peter Orszag and John Holdren, the president’s assistant for science and technology, wrote a memo to the president, saying that Constellation “is over budget, behind schedule, off course, and ‘unexecutable.’”

  That last word—unexecutable—had been the conclusion of an independent commission, led by Norman Augustine, the former chief executive of Lockheed Martin. If Augustine, the ultimate industry insider, could be so critical of a program that his former company was involved in, the Obama administration had the cover it needed. And it began to move to cancel Constellation.

  “The estimated cost for developing the Ares I and Orion has increased from about $18 billion to $34 billion,” the two senior members of the White House wrote to the president. “Once the vehicles are available, operations costs are also expected to be high, ranging from $2 billion to $3.6 billion a year to service the Space Station. (Russian spacecraft cost $300 million to $400 million per year to conduct these missions.)”

  Obama highlighted the last two sentences, and scribbled a handwritten note in the margin: “What explains the vast difference?”

  The difference was that the United States was paying the Russians for just a taxi service to the station—and not for the development costs for the rockets. But still, the numbers were glaring.

  And they now had the attention of the president.

  IN EARLY 2010, Obama pulled the trigger, canceling Constellation outright. Just as the SpaceX lobbyist had predicted, an intense fight broke out in Washington.

  “The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” said Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican member of the appropriations committee. “If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be the agency of pipe dreams and fairy tales.”

  Michael Griffin, the former NASA administrator who had started the Constellation program, said canceling it “means that essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future. The path that they’re on with this budget is a path that can’t work.”

  Obama’s plan to rely on the commercial sector to ferry astronauts to the station as part of the commercial crew program also faced immediate skepticism.

  “One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,” Griffin said. “It’s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn’t flown the Atlantic, and they’re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.”

  The White House could perhaps withstand the criticisms of the former NASA administrator. It could maybe even weather the attacks from Shelby and his cronies in the Senate. But soon it had an even bigger problem on its hands—one it didn’t foresee: Neil Armstrong and some of his fellow astronauts, who wrote a scathing letter to Obama decrying the decision to cancel Constellation along with the shuttle program.

  The founding fathers of space were furious, and saw the decision as an abdication of the dreams of their generation, who at the “because it is hard” urging of John F. Kennedy had pulled off the moon landing and had expected that the first small steps of the Space Age would be followed by the promise of giant leaps for humanity, to Mars and beyond. But now the astronauts saw only retreat, and troubling signs that suggested the Apollo moon landing was a fluke, a onetime feat never to be repeated.

  After Apollo, president after president had promised the next great American adventure in space, new lunar missions, even Mars. But years passed, then decades, and NASA remained confined to the low Earth orbit of the International Space Station, a mere 240 miles away. It was as if Columbus had discovered the New World and no one followed.

  THE WHITE HOUSE was losing the public relations battle. Neil Armstrong, of all people, had come out against the decision. For the Obama administration, the timing could not have been worse. It was in the middle of the fight to push through the health-care initiative, the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and it didn’t need any distractions. Particularly not one in space, which wasn’t a high priority. And it certainly did not need America’s heroes criticizing the nation’s chief executive.

  This needed to be fixed, and fast. So the White House decided to bring out the president himself to help remedy what was turning into an increasingly difficult problem. Aides started preparing a speech to be delivered on April 15, 2010, at the Kennedy Space Center, the first and only major space address of Obama’s presidency, one that would show that the United States would retain its leadership role in space.

  The president began by acknowledging Buzz Aldrin, who supported the decision to ditch Constellation and whose seat front and center was a not-so-subtle counter to Armstrong, Cernan, and Lovell. And then Obama took aim at Bush’s plan to return to the moon.

  “I just have to say pretty bluntly here: we’ve been there before,” he said. “Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do.”

  The nation wouldn’t abandon plans for deep space exploration, he promised. Astronauts would, for the first time, land on an asteroid. By the 2030s, a crew would fly around Mars, he said, “with a landing on Mars to follow.” He did not, however, say when that would happen, only that “I expect to be around to see it.”

  At the time, though, most people focused on how Obama had changed course, killing Bush’s program. But he did throw a bone to the traditional industrial base, pledging to keep Lockheed Martin’s Orion crew capsule. Ultimately, after intense negotiations with Congress, the White House would agree to develop a heavy-lift rocket that was similar to the Ares V. The Ares I rocket, however, was gone.

  Arguably, the most significant element of the speech, however, was a commitment to rely on the relatively unproven com
mercial sector for rides to low Earth orbit. This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency’s highest reaches were wary of, and a huge and risky bet for the Obama administration. Even NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was initially against the commercial crew program—putting him at odds with Garver, his deputy. But the White House had made up its mind. Under Obama, NASA would go ahead and retire the space shuttle, and hire contractors to fly missions to the International Space Station. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on other missions in deep space.

  “Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,” the president said during his speech. “I disagree. The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly fifty years ago, to the Space Shuttle Discovery currently orbiting overhead. By buying the services of space transportation—rather than the vehicles themselves—we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met. But we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies—from young startups to established leaders—compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.”

  THE LINE OF the speech, the one that would resonate for years to come, was Obama’s “We’ve been there before.” But there was an image that spoke just as loud—one that came about by accident. In addition to the speech, the White House was looking for a photo op, one that would show the president at Cape Canaveral, alongside a rocket, to demonstrate his commitment to space.

  To assuage concerns after the battle over Constellation, the White House decided that Obama would visit the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The message was clear: while the president might have just canceled one of their major programs, the traditional contractors were still a vital part of the American space program. His presence by their rocket would be an endorsement and a signal to Congress designed to ease its concerns.